Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  He was out of my class and I was pleased because I wanted to be out of it too. It was therefore a shock to learn that he lived on the St Ann’s council estate, bordering the affluent private sector of Stanwix, and he went to Stanwix School because one to serve St Ann’s had not yet been built. This information changed everything. St Ann’s estate was certainly superior in the pecking order to Raffles, but we had just moved to another estate, Longsowerby, which in turn was infinitely superior to St Ann’s. There was a piano in their house, true, and he did own and play a violin (excruciatingly badly), but these were not after all indications of a leisurely life-style any more than his mother’s reading of Dickens. Far from lolling on any chaise-longue, his mother never sat down. Her reading was done while stirring pans on the stove. She was always exhausted, a Scottish working-class woman so worn down by her circumstances that she made my own mother’s way of life look almost genteel. The Davies household was chaotic and far shabbier than my own, and the struggle to make ends meet much, much harder.

  So he wasn’t out of my class at all. He was bang in the midst of it (though if his father hadn’t become ill he might not have been). On the whole, once I’d realised this, it was a relief. I had ideas well above my station in life but then so did he. Each of us hankered after what we did not have, both in material and in general terms. Neither of us had to explain to the other why we wanted to have an existence quite different from that of our hard-up families, why we wanted money, why we wanted the life it could buy. These weren’t trivial goods either – to have a spacious house to live in, and a car, and money in a bank to support us were deadly serious aims not for one moment to be despised as merely mercenary. We didn’t have to waste time discussing it. Like Jennie and Nye, we knew the power of money, knew it could change our lives. Neither of us had been grindingly poor, we’d never gone hungry (though, like Jennie, I had been luckier than he had – I’d had the packed Christmas stocking, the new clothes). But all the same our experience was close enough to form a bond which mattered. If I’d been a wife with a privileged background I can see I might have run into trouble trying to understand a husband whose impoverished upbringing made him guard every penny closely. And the other way round, if I’d been the wife of a man indulged from birth, it would have been equally difficult – I’d have slipped into accusations of ‘you-don’t-know-what-it’s-like-to-be-poor’.

  So it is convenient, and maybe more than that, to share the same background. To share the same location was another bonus, one Jennie and Nye didn’t have. I’d been born and brought up in Carlisle, where my family had lived for generations, whereas he had been born in Scotland, coming to the city aged four, leaving it again at seven, and finally settling there aged eleven. It didn’t make him a Cumbrian, but nevertheless it made Carlisle his home too. He didn’t know it the way I did, though. I knew every village for miles around the city, not to mention having a detailed knowledge of the Solway coast and the northern Lake District. He knew his own area and the centre of Carlisle and that was about it. With his father being an invalid, and his mother a stranger to the place, he’d never been introduced to the surrounding countryside as I had. I introduced him. We took buses to their respective termini, or little local trains which would drop us off at outlying villages, and then walked for miles. We cycled, too, and had picnics in hidden places he’d never have found on his own. Jennie showed Nye her part of Scotland, he showed her his part of Wales, but we absorbed together the beauty of our county and when we left home this gave us a shared geographical memory.

  Coming from the same place as well as the same social background seems rarer today. Background matters more than place, but in my case both were significant when I became a wife. Having the same points of reference from which to develop cut out so many explanations and united us in common goals. Together we wanted to escape the limits of our social background and gain what our city couldn’t give us. We wanted go to in the same direction, as did Jennie and Nye. The urge to succeed on a materialistic level was identical. It was desperately important to become householders, coming as we did from families who had only ever been able to rent council houses (and what they rented hardly worth the money). My passion to own my own house was greater than Jennie’s. When I was young, the game I played more than any other was imagining having my own house. I’d draw it, and draw the furniture, over and over again. I’d eye other people’s houses too, systematically invading those I liked until in my head I’d made them my own. I’d concentrate hard on the bathroom, loathing as I did our outside lavatory, and I always found space for a room which didn’t exist in any house I knew, the Library. But buying a house was hard, if nothing like as hard as it is today in London, and it took us three years until, in 1963, we managed it.

  It bore no resemblance to the house I’d yearned for, which was a romantic cottage a little like Jennie and Nye’s first home. This house, the house we still live in, was late Victorian, flat-fronted with a balcony on the first floor, and semi-detached. It was in an appalling state of repair and, though it had an indoor lavatory, that was the only sign of modernisation. The woodwork and walls had remained untouched for nearly a hundred years and the place was falling to bits, dangerously so. It cost £5,250, and we bought it on a twenty-year mortgage. Once the deposit had been paid, we had no money to do more than put in a proper kitchen and bathroom, and have it rewired, and then the builders moved out, leaving us to do all the rest. It took a year of coming home from work each day (I was still teaching) to rip off filthy wallpapers and burn off the dark brown paint, before we could start decorating. We lived in two rooms, the kitchen and the bedroom. Our families, when they came to visit, were horrified – it seemed to them that their council houses were infinitely preferable to our ancient, decrepit, cold, mostly empty big house. But my joy in the house grew all the time. Like Jennie, that aspect of being a wife satisfied me – I loved sanding the floors (very daring for 1963) with a machine we hired and laying the black-and-white tiles in the kitchen so that it would look like a Dutch interior, and choosing paints and wallpapers. Gradually, the two floors of the house that were ours were cleaned and decorated even if only two of the five rooms had furniture in them.

  There was another floor, the top floor, occupied by Mrs Hall, our sitting tenant, without whose presence the price of the house would have been much greater, making it impossible for us to buy. The estate agent had described her as an old woman who visited her daughter in America often and might soon move there for good. She was away during the negotiations, which naturally gave credence to the suggestion that she might never come back. She had two rooms and a kitchen on the top floor – we noted the thirty-eight steps up to it and hoped they would soon get too much for her – but no bathroom. She shared ours. For the first three months we lived in ignorance of what this would mean, but then she returned. We were startled to see that she wasn’t old and feeble at all. She was only in her late sixties, and clearly good for another twenty years, and had a very forceful personality. Every day began with her thundering down to the lavatory where, after she’d finished, she used a vile Fresh Breeze spray. The bathroom was on a half-landing five steps down from our bedroom but the fumes were so heavy they drifted into it and we woke to their disgusting stench. What was almost worse than that was how noisy she was – just one thin, small woman, but she was endlessly rattling around, radio and television played at full volume and sometimes simultaneously. But there was nothing to be done. We had to remind ourselves that without her, we’d have no house, and we must just learn to enjoy the part of it we did have. It wasn’t difficult. I loved it when we got to the stage of being able to furnish it. Like Jennie, I spent days, we both did, searching for the right desk, the prettiest mirror, the most comfortable chairs. This home-making was of incredible importance to me.

  But to him, I think, it was more important to own the house. It was the significance of possession which made the greater impact. It was he, the husband, who’d done the buying, the vital or
ganising of the finance, and I, as the wife, had fallen readily into the traditional role of doing the beautifying. Inside the house felt my territory more than his. I chose the colour schemes, I decided where things should go. Consultations with him were over the big things, usually because they involved expense, but the trivial decisions were all mine – he hadn’t much interest in what kind of bread bin to buy, or where the cutlery drawer should be. Those were wives’ concerns. And I relished every mundane purchase, feeling as they accumulated that I was gathering around me more than a lot of unimportant belongings. I was, in the most literal sense, making a home. I’d have made one even if I had never been a wife – it is no prerogative of the married woman after all – but doing it as a wife meant in that respect the home belonged to me more than to him. It is one way in which even wives like Mary Livingstone, never mind Jennie Lee, triumph. Being the wife is, in that respect, no disadvantage.

  Money matters in a marriage. It always has done. First, it was wives not having any of their own, or, if they had, not having the right to keep it; then, once Acts like the Married Woman’s Property Act had been passed (1882) and wives had the right to keep anything they earned or inherited, it was the sharing of the money, the managing of it, which was significant. Mary Livingstone suffered, first because she had no money and then because she didn’t know how to handle what she was given; Fanny Stevenson yearned to have a job which would mean she would feel independent within her marriage but couldn’t try to obtain one because this would reflect badly on her husband’s ability to keep her. But Jennie Lee had her own money, gained through employment of a sort she enjoyed, and she knew how to manage it. In her marriage, most unusually, she was the one who looked after finance. In that respect, she was a good wife.

  I know that, unlike Jennie, I have been a bad wife. It is not only that I do not share the managing of it, but that I have nothing whatsoever to do with it. I am a disgrace to my own feminist aspirations. To be obliged to admit, as I am obliged to admit, that I do not know how much money we have is disgraceful. I don’t even know how much we have in our bank account. It is joint, and always has been. I don’t have a separate account in my own name. If we have shares in anything, I don’t know about them, and as for pension arrangements, they are a mystery. I have never once gone to the annual meeting with our accountant. I know nothing about any investments. If asked, I would not be able to tell you, either, how much we need to live on each year. In short, he handles every single thing to do with money and that is something of which I am ashamed.

  Quite how this state of affairs came about, I’m not entirely sure. As a child, an adolescent and a student, I was brilliant with money. I have sweet little account books going back to when I was eleven in which every item of expenditure, and every incoming bit of pocket money, and amounts earned from doing jobs, are all solemnly listed. I saved, I spent wisely, and I was certainly interested in earning more money as soon as possible. But then, when I got married, I seemed perfectly happy to leave everything to do with managing our money to him. Since we didn’t have much, it wasn’t too complicated. His first wage packet contained £14. I remember spreading the notes out on the kitchen table and dividing them up: £1 for his mother, to be sent each week, and the rest going on rent and food. My wage, as a teacher, went into the bank. All of it. I was in charge of spending on food and household goods and I budgeted carefully, so my lack of interest in our money doesn’t date from then. I’m sure I knew in 1960 how much we had and what our bills were. It was later, when we began to hit lucky, that any financial awareness gradually faded out of me, and now it is my nightmare that I might ever again have to take over handling our financial affairs. I tell myself that, of course, I could do it, that I am perfectly capable, just as capable as Jennie and much more so than Mary and Fanny, but I would hate to have to do so. I’ve become one of those simpering creatures who bleat that their husbands look after the money, implying that their pretty little heads can’t cope with it.

  I think myself lucky to have a husband who keeps an eagle eye on our money, and yet at the same time I am not proud of my own lack of involvement. I feel I should at least have my own bank account, as well as a joint account, with some modest sum in it which only I would know about. So why don’t I? Because the only reason I would quite like it, apart from my feminist guilt, is that then he would never have to know how much I spend on presents, especially presents for him. I bought him a beautiful garden bench to celebrate our ruby wedding anniversary and knew that his pleasure in it would be marred when, a month later, the Barclaycard bill came in and he saw what it had cost.

  If this gives the impression that I am a wife who is a spendthrift, then it is wrong, but I am constantly glad that, since I earn my own money, I do not really have to justify what I spend. I enjoy the fantastic freedom of not having to worry about how much a theatre ticket or a book costs, of buying clothes I don’t really need, of doing the weekly shopping without regard for price. And yet within all this apparent disregard for money I am very far from extravagant and he knows it. I have never in my life bought designer clothes, or expensive jewellery, nor spent a fortune on having my hair cut. None of those allegedly ‘feminine’ things attracts me, he’s never had to tut-tut and say, oh dear me, the amount my wife spends on herself. Sometimes, when I say that yes, it is a new coat, it was £160, he says he cannot believe the price, all that money for a new coat, especially when there was nothing wrong so far as he could see with the old one. One of my daughters laughs at him – to her, he is like a caricature of the controlling husband. And I have let myself become a caricature of the defensive wife.

  It is a game played in countless marriages, but it shouldn’t be played in mine. I would rather be a wife like Jennie, alert to making money work and capable of making sure it did to the advantage of the marriage in general. When I was poor, or passing-poor, I was, and if I were to be poor again I certainly would, but a sense of affluence has made me too relaxed about where my money goes and I am happy and relieved to let him attend to its welfare. I don’t want to be a wife in charge of the money, even if much of it is my own.

  Money comes into it again when I try to think of whether I am a brake on him in the way Jennie was not on Nye. A ‘good wife’ is somehow supposed to curb her husband’s more reckless impulses but, of course, she never did. Instead, she urged him on, which many thought proved her a very bad wife indeed. It isn’t a very attractive image, the thought of being some kind of restraining force, but I think I’ve tried to be, believing it is one of the functions of a wife. And I have failed, particularly when it comes to buying property.

  With his famous financial acumen, he decided in the 1970s that, as self-employed people, we should prepare for a time when our books and his freelance journalism fell out of favour and we needed an income. What made sense to him was the purchase of another house which he would then convert into flats and let to tenants (one of whom would be his sister, who wanted to move to London). The whole idea made me feel ill. I could see immediately where this scheme would lead. Simply being a landlord to Mrs Hall, in his own house, which he could hardly cope with looking after anyway, had already proved a trial to him. The moans and groans when the roof leaked, or the plumbing went wrong, were dire. Please, I said, do not buy another house. It will give you nothing but headaches. Theoretically, I should have had the right of veto, but I didn’t. He went ahead and bought this other house, in the same street as ours. It was in the same terrible state ours had originally been in, and it had not one but two sitting tenants, so there was only one floor to let. For the next ten years, he, as the landlord, was driven mad by having to cope with its leaking pipes, its collapsing ceilings, and the aggravation of tenants who naturally complained all the time. In the end, it was sold and as an investment justified its purchasing. But in terms of the stress owning it had given him, it was a disaster.

  Fortunately, the other ways in which I have failed to act as a brake have never been important in the grand scheme
of things. Far more significant has been my influence, as a wife, in providing a support system at crucial times, ready with sympathy and encouragement when things go wrong, but harder than that is critical support, the sort needed when I saw he had been at fault but he didn’t recognise this. Dangerous ground, only to be trodden on very carefully, but if a wife can’t be depended on to do this, who can? For the ordinary wife, it is hard enough, but for the wife of a public man it is as difficult as it is necessary. Public wives are supposed to ‘stand by their man’ whatever happens. Nobody knows if Hillary Clinton, say, or Mary Archer, lashed out unrelentingly in private at their respective husbands, but in public they stood by them. Big mistake, surely, in both those cases. Such visible loyalty only appeared to condone their husbands’ behaviour, though it is quite possible each of these wives thought she was being noble and doing what she did for the sake of higher ideals.